Lost Cities
Scavenging the Cultural Apocalypse
A video projection and sound installation
“Lost Cities” is a psycho-geographical, mixed-media narrative that explores pre and post apocalyptic urban landscapes and architectural backdrops through imaginary characters named “the sub-colonials” who move, dance, and tread through these past, futurist, and surreal environments. Technically realized using video projection and sound via low-power FM radio transmitters œLost Cities is an electronically animated shadow-play, inventing a futurist epic by drawing on the free association of sounds and images from many different world cultures.
This projection will open with footage from the Tenderloin neighborhood taken from the past and present day. The first three chapters of œLost Cities follow.
Time itself is the central protagonist of this narrative as it floats in a sci-fi fantasy of end of time, beginning of time and timelessness. Like everything else in our late stage capitalism time has been commodified so no matter how much time we save, we have no time to spare. And in every moment another species on our planet is lost, from the cities to the wilderness. The sub-colonials have reemerged in an innocent and suspended state, navigating by sound in their media dreams through a post apocalyptic/futurist/familiar world of ruined landscapes.
FROM DUSK TO DAWN, in or around 6th & Market St., TUNE-IN TO FM 89.1 to experience FULL SOUND + VISION of LOST CITIES.
SPECIAL PUBLIC EVENT
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 19 at 5:30pm – 6:30pm
(bicycles with FM Tuners and boomboxes WELCOMED!)
Join artists Chris Brown and Johanna Poethig, along with bicyclists, as they transform the corner of 6th and Market Street into a unique outdoor surround sound environment. Through RF Technology, each bicyclist will transmit their unique channel of sound from “Lost Cities” into the neighborhood around Market Street creating a multi-layered sound+vision extravaganza!
Participants include bicyclists: Linda Trunzo, Shanna Sordahl, Andrew Weathers, Rachel Trapp, John Elliott, Benjamin Tinker, John Teasdale, Sam Withrow.
Chris Brown
Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. Collaboration and improvisation are consistent themes in his work, as well as the invention and performance of new electronic instruments. These range from electro-acoustic instruments (œGazamba, 1982), to acoustic instrument transformation systems (œLava, 1992), and audience interactive FM radio installations (œTransmissions, 2004). He also writes his own interactive music software that he uses in his compositions and improvisations. He has been a member for over 20 years of the pioneering computer network music band THE HUB. As a performer he has recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Larry Ochs, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; as an improvisor he has recorded with Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Ikue Mori, Alvin Curran, William Winant, Biggi Vinkeloe, Don Robinson, and Frank Gratkowski, among many others. Recordings of his music are available on New World, Tzadik, Pogus, Intakt, Rastascan, Ecstatic Peace, Red Toucan, SIRR, and Artifact labels. Recent performances include as featured composer/performer on the Donaueschingen MusikTage in October 2009, and the premiere of a new work for gongs and live electronics in February 2010 at the Ugnayan Festival at the University of the Philippines. He is a Professor of Music at Mills College where he is also Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).
http://www.cbmuse.com
Johanna Poethig
Johanna Poethig makes work that crosses the private and public realms. She has exhibited internationally and has been actively creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture, community collaborations, multi-media installations and performances for 25 years. Her public art works intervene in the urban landscape on public buildings, freeways, in parks, hospitals, jails, schools, universities, homeless shelters, and advertising venues. Her paintings, sculpture, video and installations reflect her interest in form, narrative, symbol, satire, society and our consumerist culture. Her work is conceptually driven but interpreted through materials that best realize these ideas, She produces and participates in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, props, cabaret, experimental music and video.
She has just completed several major works of public art in downtown San Francisco for the Civic Center Post Office, the historic International Hotel/Manilatown Heritage Center and for the new low income housing, 149 Mason Street Studios, through Glide Foundation. Her video, WIGband Stimulus Spa, was selected for the 2010 Berkeley Film and Video Festival. She was part of the 2008 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 5 with the Galleon Trade international artist exchange. Her recent exhibits include solo shows at Crossing Tracks Gallery in San Diego and the Togonon Gallery In San Francisco. She has also shown at SFMOMA Artist™s Gallery, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, Kruglak Gallery, Galeria de la Raza, New Langton Arts, The Luggage Store Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Lab and Mag:net Gallery Katipunan and The Living Room artspace in Manila. Johanna is a professor at the Visual and Public Art department at California State University, Monterey Bay.
www.johannapoethig.com
http://johannapoethig.wordpress.com/